Jewish Mad Men: Advertising and the Design of the American Jewish Experience by Kerri P. Steinberg (review)

Kerri Steinberg’s original study arrives at a propitious moment, when advertising has been propelled into national consciousness by the popular television show Mad Men (2007–15), from which she derives her book’s title. She argues that advertisements tell stories and aims to flesh out the meaning of those stories vis-à-vis the history of American advertising, the efficacy of specific advertisements as a mode of persuasion, and the reciprocal relationship advertising has apropos the American Jewish encounter. As Steinberg writes, “Ads reference how Jews both absorbed and influenced the broader history and culture of America” (4). That is to say, Steinberg parallels advertising campaigns, from the late nineteenth century through the current time, to the Jewish experience of immigration, assimilation, mainstream acceptance, suburbanization, and pluralism. All of these discussions are aptly realized and further grounded by Jewish communal priorities and their intersection with advertising–including support of Israel, social justice causes, the revitalization of Jewish affiliation, and stemming intermarriage.

With an eye toward jingles, taglines, copywriting, and design, the book’s broad sweep examines early ads in Jewish publications like the American Israelite and the Jewish Daily Forward to contemporary campaigns exploiting the possibilities of billboards and other, newer outlets. The advertisements that Steinberg investigates–through subject, context, and style–took three major tacks: efforts directed at Jewish consumers, trying to make “non-Jewish” products appealing (e.g., Maxwell House Coffee); attempts to mainstream so-called Jewish products (e.g., Manischewitz wine and Levy’s Real Jewish Rye); and more recently, endeavors to market specifically Jewish products to Jews, especially in non-traditional media (e.g., JDate).

Several major players impacted Jewish advertising, notably Albert Lasker, Bill Bernbach, and the underappreciated pioneer Joseph Jacobs. A fair portion of the book offers biographies of these pivotal figures and describes their marketing strategies. Jacobs, head of the Joseph Jacobs Organization, was essential to establishing a Jewish market. Among his organization’s best known enterprises were the creation of the ubiquitous “K” and “OU” symbols to designate kosher status and, most famously, in 1932 convincing Maxwell House to issue a free haggadah, which for decades has linked Passover to the coffee brand. Employing a similar tactic, in 1933 Jacobs urged Crisco to create a Kosher cookbook, written in Yiddish and English, so that Jewish women would better understand how to substitute the vegetable shortening for what was then the more commonly used lard. The Maxwell House haggadah’s ubiquity and reach is so pervasive that President Obama used it when he led his first Seder at the White House in 2009. Moreover, in honor of the ceremonial guide’s eightieth anniversary, the White House featured a display of Maxwell House haggadahs during American Jewish Heritage Month. Particularly fruitful is when Steinberg deploys her art history training, offering illuminating visual analyses of different advertisements, which she does in her discussion of the Maxwell House haggadah’s evolving design over time.

Bill Bernbach, one of the founders the Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) agency, also receives pride of place in Jewish Mad Men. His post-war accomplishments were served by a change in design conception to a text-image integration and the influence of a growing multicultural environment, which freed Jews–and thereby advertising–to more openly announce and take pride in difference. As Steinberg puts it, “By the 1960s, as the white-bread image of America and American advertising gradually began to give way to a more diversified picture, DDB was positioned to lead the way using advertising to advance American social and cultural revolutions” (131). Levy’s Real Jewish Rye promotion best exemplifies this sort of social change; to start, Bernbach explicitly associated rye bread with Jewishness by changing the company’s name from Levy’s Real Rye to Levy’s Real Jewish Rye, moving from a tacit to an explicit acknowledgment of the bread’s distinctive affiliation by...